


Weightless

by thehobblefootalchemist



Series: Like Calligraphy on Scrap Paper [5]
Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: A look at the inevitable complications that arise, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Gen, for the human half of a human/ghost relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 18:39:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13687500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehobblefootalchemist/pseuds/thehobblefootalchemist
Summary: It was a curious feeling, to realize you were dead.In which I received the one-word prompt that became this fic's title and went absolutely ham with it.





	1. Chapter 1

**i. absence of form**

Jazz’s initial impression was that she was having, for the first time in her life, an out of body experience. She soon realized however that this was not precisely the case, and for a very simple reason: her body as she saw it, lying withered upon her bed, was displaying no sign whatsoever that it was breathing. This therefore meant that she could not be having an experience new to her life, for in fact she had died.

She stared at her own corpse for quite some time before it occurred to her to wonder exactly what she was staring _with_ —she could look at things, but when she tried to get a handle on whatever form she had now, Jazz discovered that she didn’t appear to have one to speak of. There wasn’t a mirror present in the room she could use to be sure but she rather thought that if one could exist as pure consciousness, she might have found herself in that state.

It was a curious feeling, to realize you were dead. Jazz had been prepared for it for years of course, but to have it finally be upon her… Honestly it was sort of a relief. Her constant aches and pains were gone, and she did not have to struggle to see or breathe. Attaining great age before passing was something she’d aspired to but it did have its serious drawbacks.

She was still musing along such lines when a sound caught her attention. Jazz searched with her not-eyes, turning her not-head until she found the source of the noise: the Ghostwriter had leaned forward in the chair that sat by the bedside, his head bowed low such that she could not see his face. He had begun to breathe, uncharacteristically deep and shaky intakes of air, and his hands had gnarled into the hair behind his neck as if he were positioning himself for safety during an airplane crash.

She did not at the time have a chest that could constrict or a throat in which air could catch, but nonetheless Jazz still keenly felt what equivalent she could of those sensations as she looked on over her husband’s grief. She had known her death would hit him very hard—hence why she had made sure his brother Randy was also staying in the house with them for support in the weeks leading up to it—but it was something else entirely to actually watch it beginning to happen. In her sixty years of knowing him Jazz had seen him happy pleasantly often, but he was not a man who’d ever been given to sharing heartache; in the whole of their acquaintance he had only ever truly broken down in front of her twice.

Desperately she wished to call out to him, to make her presence known to him in any manner possible, but she knew due to research there would be no such avenue available to her, not until the dimensions got themselves in order and her essence was slingshot to its proper place in the Ghost Zone.

At least…she was assuming she would be heading to the Ghost Zone. Her family had eventually gathered that there must be several possible locations one’s ‘soul’ could end up following their death, and Jazz had always possessed the self-awareness to know which direction her detail-oriented and obsessive nature would likely take her post-mortem. Hell, she’d…even begun to hope for the Ghost Zone as her final destination, if she was going to continue the pattern of honesty with herself. In no small part due to the fact that she’d gone and fallen for one of its inhabitants.

Thinking of Writer, she refocused on him as he began to move once more. He didn’t raise his head, but removed his hands from his neck and with a fierce gesture from his dominant one called the manifestation of his power into existence before his chair: a section of his reality-warping computer, which hung potent and patient in the air before the ghost until he finally set his fingers to its keyboard and began to type. Jazz couldn’t get her non-body around quickly enough to see what command he’d tapped out before the computer disappeared, but, after a saddeningly short interval of time, it became clear what he’d written without her having had to read it.

Though ghosts often retained mostly-human appearance, it was a fact of spectral biology that ectoplasmic-based life differed starkly from humans, even if the ghost had been human before their death. As such, certain functions familiar and sometimes necessary to a living person were off-limits to them. They could not eat or drink, and in the absence of such intakes had no resultant bodily responses—no need for such a thing as a bathroom, nor even the effect of sweating after severe exertion.

They also definitively did not possess any ability to cry, as the Ghostwriter was now doing less than an arm’s length away.

It felt indecent—an intrusion, despite the act’s direct tie to her—but Jazz couldn’t look away from him, not when she had to believe (despite her knowledge) that if she simply looked hard enough, it would allow him to see her as well as she did him. Her desperation proved fruitless, though, and the writer’s emotional freefall carried on without anything present that could halt it. He first removed his glasses, and then outright hurled them onto the floor in order better brace his head with both hands as he leaned forward once more. Jazz was forced to hear his breathing become labored almost past the point of being able to take in any air at all, and when he began to sob so freely that every motion was a shudder, every exhale a whimper, well…that was about the point that Jazz had had quite enough.

 _Hurry it up already, will you?!_ she ordered the universe in a soundless shout. _Process me and be done with it!_

And for a wonder, the universe listened. Jazz felt her consciousness began to cloud out, the wisps of the nothing that made her essence up somehow stretching even more thinly, until the last impression of the living world she could make out was the vivid purple blur of Writer’s coat.

 _I’ll find him_ was the last coherent thought she had before fading completely, the thought she hung onto because it was one of the only ones she could muster that would make what was happening even slightly okay. _Wherever I end up reforming, I’ll find him._


	2. Chapter 2

**ii. absence of mass**

Well this was…strange.

It was true that strange was a descriptor that didn’t even begin to cover what Jazz Fenton was going through, but it was the best one she could come up with at the time when she awoke to find herself floating (yes, _floating_ , her brain reaffirmed in the mental version of a shout) in the middle of an actually quite comfortable and inviting room.

Having a ghost for a significant other meant that Jazz had a certain familiarity with the ethereal, but never once before this point had she been responsible for her own state of being off the ground. Resultantly she did panic a little upon her first manifestation, flailing some in her attempt to get back to the sort of gravity she knew, but only really achieving a certain amount of mid-air somersaulting that was as disorienting as it was unhelpful. She’d had to settle for upside-down staring at the room’s plush carpeting as her mind went mile-a-minute, sorting through what must have gone down since she’d left the living world.

Okay…okay. She was reasonably certain of a few things. Her essence had finally taken form on one of the other planes, and judging by the way her skin had gone deathly pale and now held a certain glow (and the fact that you’re _floating_ , her head yelled again), that plane was likely the Ghost Zone. Following on from that, she assumed that the little space she was occupying was what the locals called a lair.

_Lair_. Jazz turned the word over. It seemed weird to apply it to such a plain space, something that looked so human and downright _normal_ compared to the other locations the dimension’s populace could produce. In fact, when she’d managed to crane her neck around enough to take it all in, it didn’t look terribly dissimilar to one of the more pleasant offices she’d occupied during her career in psychology. There was a plush armchair, a futon, stocked bookcases, and even a writing desk tucked away in one of the corners. The only thing that seemed slightly out of place was the room’s door.

Setting her mouth in a determined line, Jazz began to make effort toward getting over to the place’s apparent exit. To truly know where she was she needed to look at what was on the other side of it (though, judging by the wood’s vaguely purple aura, she had a good feeling she might already know what things looked like out there, and regardless of the fact that seeing them would mean she was exactly where she wanted to be Jazz wished those ‘things’ weren’t quite so terrifying to contemplate).

The little clock hanging on the wall over the desk told her that her little expedition took an embarrassing forty-five minutes. Getting the hang of yourself when all your body apparently wanted to do was literally hang around was very difficult, and Jazz had gotten frustrated quickly. _How the hell did Danny ever manage this so well?_ she wondered at one point, so into the task that she had quite forgotten that the panting she was doing from her exertion was more than unnecessary, seeing as how if she was indeed a ghost she needn’t be breathing at all. When it did hit her that that was the case it was something of a paradigm shift—since her teenage years Jazz had remained an active woman and it was certainly something to consider uncoupling increased lung use from exercise.

_Stop getting bogged down in minutia,_ she eventually criticized herself with a firm shake of her head. _Wondering about the technical aspects of all of this isn’t going to help at the moment._

Somewhat ironically, however, the motion she’d subjected her head to made Jazz notice something else that had escaped her before then—something that distracted her utterly. Her hair, which she’d always kept long and, until it had begun to silver in her sixties, had always remained fervently orange, had gone whiter than freshly fallen snow.

_Just like Danny’s and Randy’s,_ she thought, wondering at the concept, reaching out to pull a few strands taut so that she might observe them better. _…Like a ghost’s._

Jazz allowed her hand to fall, turning her attention instead, finally, to the waiting doorknob. Enough of allowing things to put her off. It was time to make undeniable sure of what she was hoping was true. The bit of hair she’d held remained horizontal in the air just where it had been when she took her hand away, leisurely floating in place just like the rest of her.

When she gathered the courage to send the doorway creaking open several cautious inches, the world outside of it was ( _thank god, oh, thank god_ ) instantly identifiable to Jazz. There could be no mistaking that neon green miasma that went on into infinity, dotted occasionally with masses of land and purple doors that looked nearly identical to the one she was holding onto. She was in the Ghost Zone, all right.

The one thing about it, the one little snag that punctured her relief like needle becoming acquainted in slow motion with a party balloon, was that the geography didn’t seem offhand to be anywhere in the dimension that she’d ever been before.


	3. Chapter 3

**iii. absence of experience**

Jazz had never been overly given to swearing, but by the time she’d had fifteen instances of sleep in her new little lair in the Ghost Zone and had made very little progress towards leaving it, she’d have thought someone could well have mistaken her for the most colorful person to have ever walked the living world.

Not that it was a bad lair. Jazz actually felt an overwhelming sensation of safety in the space, small though it was, and there was more than enough reading material to keep her mind occupied (or distracted, as the case might have been, whenever she became too upset about her predicament). The world seemed quiet, in here; it was a bubble of peace in an otherwise ghastly environment.

Because there was no denying that the Ghost Zone could be a potently nasty place when it wanted to be. Jazz had gotten her wish of getting where she had wanted to go, but _not getting precisely where she had wanted to go_. In her life she had actually been to a fair bit of the dimension, her brother and her husband both having taken her on the odd expedition every now and again, but it was true that the place was purported to go on infinitely. And ‘infinity’ was possibly the very worst word one could hear in reference to the breadth one needed to search to find their way back to someplace they knew—especially when the ground in between was carpeted with potentially hostile entities.

Heh—ground. Jazz let out a weak laugh. Save for the occasional hunk of self-levitating mountain range this dimension had ground in very short supply. There was nothing outside of her lair door, for instance, except for a straight drop down into a bottomless green-black void. And it was very hard getting her previously human mind to accept the fact that she was going to have to go out into it if she was going to keep the promise she’d made in her last minutes on the living plane.

Danny wasn’t dead yet, but from the time she’d met him the Ghostwriter always had been, and she was determined to fight her way through her fears and limitations in order to reach his lair again. Even though the place she was in now had been created from her own mind, tailored in every way specifically for her, Writer and his library still felt more like home.

She just needed to get some more damn control over herself first.

Due to the nature of her field of study Jazz was familiar with the theoretical, but even an expert in conjecture could be stymied by an effort as abstract as moving through a different set of gravitational rules than the ones they’d been subjected to for over eighty years. She’d somewhat managed to get the hang of motion—she could make entire laps of the room now without drifting off course when she stopped—but anything high-speed was still beyond her, as were the skills of intangibility and invisibility.

She’d _experienced_ the intangibility all right, but to imagine she had any semblance of mastery over it was laughable. Especially as it was still happening most often _without her intent_ : from time to time one of her limbs would simply start trending towards the incorporeal, which at its most exquisitely frustrating occurred when she had a manuscript in her hands.

“I wouldn’t even be able to get away from another ghost right now,” she lamented in low tones, “much less fight my way out of something.”

Assuming she would run into confrontation on her way through the uncharted fog had seemed the most pragmatic line of thinking. Not every ghost in the Zone was violent, but more than most were territorial, and she had no knowledge of ownership boundary. She would never forget the story Danny had told her of the time he’d accidentally flown into the limits of Walker’s prison while in possession of an apparently illegal item (and of what had happened to him afterwards in the compound), nor the passionate warnings Writer had also given her about steering clear of the selfsame warden. There were things here you could not do and individuals you could not mess with, full stop.

Jazz puffed out a sigh, staring at her hands again. Over the past two weeks she’d experimented and had come to the conclusion that she either had not had enough time to build up the energy necessary for ecto-blasts, or that she was similar to Writer in that she could not form them at all. And with no evident offensive capabilities…one more time she aimed a finger at the wall, but despite her best mental efforts, no type of beam emitted from the digit. Good for her interior decorating, bad for trying to form backup battle strategy.

She _really_ wished she had some of her ecto-guns from home. But then again, if wishes were worth anything she would already be at the library.

Not for the first time she wondered how Writer was faring. Neither of them had known for sure, beyond the shadow of a doubt _sure_ , what would happen to her when she passed, but from what she’d witnessed in the immediate aftermath of it she could say with reasonable certainty he would still be suffering. There had just been no way to get across to him that it was going to eventually be okay…

Jazz chewed her lip. Eventually needed to be now. She flew over to her door again, determined despite her misgivings to make another try of going outside.

The stomach-churning sensation of feeling as if she was going to fall into the void closed in on her senses as soon as she shut the door behind her, but she steeled her mind, not giving in to the fear this time. She’d been practicing, she reminded herself. She could handle keeping herself afloat.

She could handle keeping herself afloat above an infinitely deep void that held a potentially even more infinite variety of monsters—

_Oh, shut it,_ Jazz mentally berated herself. Besides ‘even more infinite’ being an oxymoronic phrase, letting herself get captured in a loop of that type of panicked thinking was categorically not going to help her. She glided forwards tentatively, away from her lair, and made a go of getting her bearings.

It…wasn’t so bad, once she quashed down the lingering human sensory inputs erroneously telling her she was in danger. Something internal that she supposed was her core was giving her the right ‘readings’ for up and down (such as they existed here) as she took an experimental glide around the area, and her motion practice appeared to be paying off in spades—she could perform the actions of stopping, restarting, and turning without the hiccups that had plagued her so those first few days (such as days existed here).

Jazz spent a while moving back and forth, making sure through the duration to keep a sharp lookout for any potential threats. No one bothered her, and she managed at the farthest to get a good few hundred feet away from the door she had not forgotten to mark as hers.

“I think I’ve got this,” she muttered when she paused a while to regain energy. Confidence, a state she hadn’t been much acquainted with since taking her new form, began to fill her up. “I think I’ve got this.”

Because there was something else her core was telling her. Inside her lair there was a distinct feeling of serenity, and the longer she stayed outside of the place the more she felt a detached form of the same feeling starting to call to her, like a kind of compass pointing her back in the direction of what on a snarky day she might call her ‘natural habitat’. But the longer she’d gone, the more she noticed a second feeling beginning to form—weaker, far weaker, but of much the same sort.

And she knew just where it would lead her when she followed it.


	4. Chapter 4

**iv. equanimity**

It was her third continuous day of flight, the same song had been in her head on repeat into the triple digits, and Jazz was starting to become antsy. The confidence she’d felt that day back at her lair had begun to wear thin; hour after hour after hour she had been parting her way through these mists and yet they never seemed to change. It was enough to demoralize even the hardiest of travelers.

She’d gotten over her fright regarding falling, at least. Jazz knew she was no expert on any of her new abilities, but a bit of flooding exposure to the abyssal dimension had tricked her brain into accepting the endless spiraling below her as normal. She just had to think of it as being afloat in the world’s largest, scariest possible swimming pool—‘here there be monsters’, yes, but at least while they were healthy and kicking a fish was not going to start sinking in water.

_I’m the fish,_ she reminded herself whenever that surety flagged. _I’m the fish, and all I have to do is keep going forward and avoid the predators._

It wasn’t an inaccurate analogy, all things considered: at the speed she was managing her legs had decided to become quite incorporeal, favoring instead the type of tapered mist that she’d seen Danny display so often when he’d bolted after a renegade spirit. It’d been startling at first but she’d soon come to accept the novelty, even taking amusement for a while in her new resemblance to some type of spectral mermaid.

_Now if only my arms would stop doing the same thing,_ she thought, reflecting on how as she’d become more tired her other limbs had been acting up without her permission, and how she really wished she’d been paying better attention when Randy had spent an afternoon waxing eloquent about some lecture notes on ghost biology.

Jazz blinked rapidly and shook her head, knowing that mental tangents like that were signs of her fatigue beginning to show. She couldn’t let herself get too distracted…

Focusing inward, she again checked the inner compass her core seemed to possess in regards to where she thought of as home. Her pull toward the library had gotten stronger in proportion to how close to it she was becoming, but paradoxically had also become less precise as her distance had lessened. She felt like she should be less than twenty minutes full-speed flight away, now, but was helpless to tell whether she needed to alter her angle of approach in any degree. At least the place was as large as it was ostentatiously decorated, she had that going for her—its owner’s frankly ludicrous amount of power meant that the lair was one fairly easily spotted from a distance.

Though wait, hang on, that bit of land looked like it could be familiar… Jazz adjusted her course, making for the jutting spire of rock. If she was right, if that was the mountain she was thinking of, then that meant that she may be even closer than she’d thought.

A cry of happiness left her when she saw it was indeed the landmark she’d hoped it to be. _She knew where she was._ They’d been by this place in the Specter Speeder more times than she could count; it was nothing at all for her to speed in the direction she needed to go, ecstatic energy sparking and bursting inside her despite how thin she was stretched.

Very like nitrous added to the fuel in a vehicle, however, the burst didn’t last nearly long enough—when the momentous white block of the library appeared on her horizon her vision was beginning to swim a bit, and when she was finally upon it the swimming had upgraded to outright blurriness. She tried to aim for the door, she really did, but the combination of her inexperience and exhaustion sent her skidding off-course, and Jazz ended up nearly colliding with one of the lair’s glowing marble-like lions. She managed to catch herself, however, by rolling into and then latching onto its mane, and as soon as she felt remotely stable gave voice as loud as she could to the name she’d been waiting for weeks to shout: “WRITER!”

Preceding any form of answer she heard a noise from off to the side, outside the library, and when she looked over to see what it was Jazz felt herself blinking stupidly. What was _she_ doing here?

She got very little time to contemplate that very important question, however, before the library’s front door was nearly ripped from its hinges. The Ghostwriter stood in the entrance, looking and breathing as though he’d just been flung from a speeding train. His gaze was panicked, searching, _searching_ , and when it found her—

“ _Jasmine._ ”

Even thirty feet away she could hear the emotion in his voice. Jazz raised her arms to him and he was there in seconds, wrapping her in the fiercest embrace he could whilst not disrupting her form. She held back just as tightly, burying her face in his collar as he had against her shoulder, not able to help the audible noise of relief that rose in her throat.

The reunion might have been perfect, if not for the nattering of that oh so very unwanted third party.

“Oh come on!” Spectra’s cold voice whined from near the window where Jazz had first spotted her. “I’ve been getting to feast on him for over a fortnight now, and you’ve gone and ruined it all!”

Fueled by deep and synchronized anger, Writer and Jazz spoke the same phrase simultaneously into one another’s shirts: “Fuck off, Penelope.”

The emotion-consuming vampire, unfortunately, did not do as she was told. She actually drifted closer and continued to complain, loudly. “That depression spiral was the best thing I’ve tasted in years. Nothing’s in there anymore but _love_ , and what kind of sickening syrupy _nonsense_ is that?”

Jazz did not fail to notice that Writer had begun trembling. “Get away,” he growled, but again Spectra seemed not to hear.

“I’m probably not going to find another meal like that for over a hundred years—I mean, that self-loathing streak was so strong I didn’t even have to be touching him to absorb it! And now that _you’ve_ shown back up, little wannabe psychology girl, there’s going to be nothing but gooey _positivity_ around this place for months, if not _longer_ , it’s outrageous—”

“LEAVE!”

A wounded animal could not have matched the ferocity in Writer’s snarl. Spectra gave an actual full-bodied flinch in the face of it, drifting backwards a few feet and blinking with shock at this abrupt change in attitude from her favorite morsel of the past several weeks.

“I…” she stammered, completely unable to regain her poise. “Well, then, um…I suppose I will be—”

“Going,” Jazz interjected. “Yes. _Now._ ”

Glaciers could have learnt from the coldness in her tone. They were still holding one another, which meant she could feel every inch of the Ghostwriter’s shaking, and Jazz rather thought she had a new understanding of the depth of ghostly grudges because she decided then and there she would never forgive Spectra for causing it.

“Get away from here,” she reiterated. “And don’t come back.”

The shadow ghost was so intimidated that she actually gave an obedient and fervent nod before rocketing away as fast as she could.

Silence descended around the library. Jazz turned her gaze to her husband, who was still staring after Spectra in a state of abject rage. She could feel the anger and pain rolling off of him like a physical tide, and now that the other ghost was gone, her own fierce emotions snuffed out under the weight of a great sadness.

“Writer,” she whispered. “Writer, she’s gone. It’s okay. She’s gone.”

Gently she touched his jaw, turning his gaze back towards hers, and was startled to see a gleam of deep red overlaying his normally bright green irises. Afraid not for herself but for him, she cupped his face in her palms and repeated herself in the calmest tones she could muster.

The red drained slowly away, and the anger along with it. Without them, however, the Ghostwriter for a moment just looked helplessly lost.

“I missed you,” he eventually managed to say, and the hoarseness in his voice was so similar to the way his breathing had broken as he’d cried for her that Jazz nearly lost her tenuous composure.

“You won’t have to ever again,” she said back, leaning up to kiss his brow. “I’m home.”

Writer’s eyes closed as he let out a fluttering exhale, and he tilted forward in their embrace to briefly lay their foreheads together. “…You’re exhausted,” he murmured. “Let me take you inside.”

He wasn’t wrong: the ectoplasmic equivalent of adrenaline had kept her going up to that point, but the thought of rest being introduced was so overwhelming it made her almost physically shaky. She nodded, allowing him to bundle her against his chest as he had done so many times before, and together the pair of them drifted up the steps of the library.

Actually, she reflected in growing drowsiness, this time was a little bit different than other times Writer had carried her. His hold on her now wasn’t merely tender but cradling, and Jazz could not help tucking her head closer over where his heart would be.

“John? I heard shouting, what in the world is—oh.”

Jazz cracked open an eye. She’d known who the voice belonged to—there was only one person who could even slightly get away with calling the Ghostwriter by his given name—but it was still a nice thing to see Randy as he was talking. He’d evidently been on the point of gliding into the living area by way of one of the side halls, but had come to an immediate full stop upon seeing his brother with Jazz in his arms. Shock was plain on his face; it soon however changed to an entirely different expression, which was a sight to see in itself.

It was not often one got to witness a sincere, candid smile upon Randy’s face.

“Jasmine,” he said quietly. “It’s good to see you.”

“You too,” she mumbled back.

“I’m taking her to rest,” the Ghostwriter told him. “Can you mind things for a while?”

“Of course,” Randy replied, and following that called out an additional remark as they left the room: “And you get some sleep too, you monumental prat.”

“Well that didn’t last long,” Jazz commented around a yawn. “It’s like he’s allergic to being openly nice for longer than ten seconds.”

“Well, it’s…” Writer coughed. “I’m not undeserving of rebuke, I’ve admittedly…not really been taking very good care of myself…”

She gripped his coat a little tighter, and he seemed to receive it as the gesture of understanding it was.

The journey wasn’t a long one, but Jazz was still nearly fully asleep even before they arrived at Writer’s room. She was barely aware of him shutting and locking the door behind them, only finding some semblance of consciousness again in the moments he let go of her in order to place her down on the mattress.

“I won’t be long,” he promised, and delivered upon it by removing his coat and scarf in rarely-displayed haste. Soon he was under the blanket right along with her, his arms back in their proper state of holding her as close as comfort would allow.

The blanket alone had had her nearly gone, and his hold only accentuated that, but still Jazz couldn’t help fighting with her eyes to keep them open for one more look at him. What he’d said earlier, regarding his self care, had stuck with her. And he hadn’t been exaggerating: Writer looked pallid even for a ghost, and drained to the point that he’d developed bruise-like shadows under his eyes. It was painfully obvious that he’d been unkind to himself even before Spectra had laid into him.

With the last of her mental acuity and hoping the request was coherent, she mumbled, “Do like he asked?”

He seemed to get what she meant. “I’ll sleep too,” he assured her. “In a little while.”

The pad of his thumb brushing across her cheek was the last sensation she felt before a serene, dreamless sleep closed in around her.


End file.
